TAKE AN INTENTIONAL WALK ON 'JOHNNY BOY'.

Byline: Evan Henerson Theater Critic

HE GOT the baseball details right.

Jeff Mandels is obviously a lover of our national pastime and its rich history. You've also got to figure that the man - whose program bio identifies him as a Seattle mortgage broker - has experienced personal loss and isn't shy about mining the subject for dramatic purposes. No harm there.

As a valentine to baseball and to a remarkable year in the sport, ``Johnny Boy'' is accurate. The scores, players, plays and attendance figures are all on target. Whether or not he personally sweated bullets over these events five decades ago, the playwright has done his homework.

What Mandels isn't - at least if ``Johnny Boy'' is any indication - is much of a storyteller. The play's world premiere at the Falcon Theatre is a predictable and overly obvious family drama about a couple of baseball-loving Brooklynite brothers, their parents and the baseball-obsessed borough of New York in 1955.

Elder brother Paul (played by Rami Malek) is a decent-hearted 16-year- old scapegrace. He's probably got a working-class future, much like his father, Lee (J. David Krassner). Kid brother Johnny (Richard Alan Brown), age 14, is in a wheelchair and doesn't seem to be showing any kind of improvement. Both boys, Johnny in particular, are nuts for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Good thing, since ``Johnny Boy'' takes place as the Dodgers are staging a World Series comeback against the hated Yankees and trying to bring a title to Brooklyn for the first time.

``I had a dream that the Dodgers are going to win the World Series,'' Johnny says far too many times. Mandels never has him add, ``And if they do, I can die happy,'' but he might as well have.

Tempers occasionally flare between the two brothers. Paul resents Johnny getting favored treatment; Lee and the boys' mother, Dotty (Stephanie Venditto), steam over all of Paul's after-school fights. And at one point, jealous Johnny sabotages a meeting between Paul and Fern (Tania Raymonde), a girl in his class. There are also lengthy scenes between Dotty and her benevolent sketch of an aunt Pearl (a droll Barbara Gruen) that are used to fill in key information and sidetrack the baseball doings. Mandels may have aspirations of Neil Simon's crown, and Pearl's randy story about breaking up with a beau - while quite funny - is something of a sideshow.

Even with an adult Paul narrating, the decision by director Arnold Margolin to cast the brothers and Fern with adult actors here seems wrong-headed. Malek and Brown aren't credible either as teens or brothers. Then again, they're behaving as Mandels' script dictates they behave. And you can hear the creaky plot wheels grinding against each other.

Keith Mitchell's backdrop cutouts of New York landmarks, including Ebbets Field, sets the stage appropriately and the proceedings are smoothly lit by lighting designer Jeremy Pivnick.

Evan Henerson, [phone]

evan.henerson(at)dailynews.com

JOHNNY BOY - Two stars

Where: Falcon Theatre, 4252 Riverside Drive, Burbank.

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, 4 p.m. Sunday; through May 9.

Tickets: $25 to $37.50. Call [phone].

In a nutshell: Soulless family drama about a great sport's great year.